OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Projective Space Stern Decoding and Application to SDitH
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We show that here standard decoding algorithms for generic linear codes over a finite field can speeded up by a factor which is essentially the size of the finite field by reducing it to a low weight codeword problem and working in the relevant projective space. We apply this technique to SDitH and show that the parameters of both the original submission and the updated version fall short of meeting the security requirements asked by the NIST.
Panoptica -- instance-wise evaluation of 3D semantic and instance segmentation maps
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces panoptica, a versatile and performance-optimized package designed for computing instance-wise segmentation quality metrics from 2D and 3D segmentation maps. panoptica addresses the limitations of existing metrics and provides a modular framework that complements the original intersection over union-based panoptic quality with other metrics, such as the distance metric Average Symmetric Surface Distance. The package is open-source, implemented in Python, and accompanied by comprehensive documentation and tutorials. panoptica employs a three-step metrics computation process to cover diverse use cases. The efficacy of panoptica is demonstrated on various real-world biomedical datasets, where an instance-wise evaluation is instrumental for an accurate representation of the underlying clinical task. Overall, we envision panoptica as a valuable tool facilitating in-depth evaluation of segmentation methods.
A Unified Simulation Framework for Visual and Behavioral Fidelity in Crowd Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Simulation is a powerful tool to easily generate annotated data, and a highly desirable feature, especially in those domains where learning models need large training datasets. Machine learning and deep learning solutions, have proven to be extremely data-hungry and sometimes, the available real-world data are not sufficient to effectively model the given task. Despite the initial skepticism of a portion of the scientific community, the potential of simulation has been largely confirmed in many application areas, and the recent developments in terms of rendering and virtualization engines, have shown a good ability also in representing complex scenes. This includes environmental factors, such as weather conditions and surface reflectance, as well as human-related events, like human actions and behaviors. We present a human crowd simulator, called UniCrowd, and its associated validation pipeline. We show how the simulator can generate annotated data, suitable for computer vision tasks, in particular for detection and segmentation, as well as the related applications, as crowd counting, human pose estimation, trajectory analysis and prediction, and anomaly detection.
Facilitating the Production of Well-tailored Video Summaries for Sharing on Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a web-based tool that facilitates the production of tailored summaries for online sharing on social media. Through an interactive user interface, it supports a ``one-click'' video summarization process. Based on the integrated AI models for video summarization and aspect ratio transformation, it facilitates the generation of multiple summaries of a full-length video according to the needs of target platforms with regard to the video's length and aspect ratio.
A Q-learning approach to the continuous control problem of robot inverted pendulum balancing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This study evaluates the application of a discrete action space reinforcement learning method (Q-learning) to the continuous control problem of robot inverted pendulum balancing. To speed up the learning process and to overcome technical difficulties related to the direct learning on the real robotic system, the learning phase is performed in simulation environment. A mathematical model of the system dynamics is implemented, deduced by curve fitting on data acquired from the real system. The proposed approach demonstrated feasible, featuring its application on a real world robot that learned to balance an inverted pendulum. This study also reinforces and demonstrates the importance of an accurate representation of the physical world in simulation to achieve a more efficient implementation of reinforcement learning algorithms in real world, even when using a discrete action space algorithm to control a continuous action.
A Self-Commissioning Edge Computing Method for Data-Driven Anomaly Detection in Power Electronic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Ensuring the reliability of power electronic converters is a matter of great importance, and data-driven condition monitoring techniques are cementing themselves as an important tool for this purpose. However, translating methods that work well in controlled lab environments to field applications presents significant challenges, notably because of the limited diversity and accuracy of the lab training data. By enabling the use of field data, online machine learning can be a powerful tool to overcome this problem, but it introduces additional challenges in ensuring the stability and predictability of the training processes. This work presents an edge computing method that mitigates these shortcomings with minimal additional memory usage, by employing an autonomous algorithm that prioritizes the storage of training samples with larger prediction errors. The method is demonstrated on the use case of a self-commissioning condition monitoring system, in the form of a thermal anomaly detection scheme for a variable frequency motor drive, where the algorithm self-learned to distinguish normal and anomalous operation with minimal prior knowledge. The obtained results, based on experimental data, show a significant improvement in prediction accuracy and training speed, when compared to equivalent models trained online without the proposed data selection process.
FaceStudio: Put Your Face Everywhere in Seconds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This study investigates identity-preserving image synthesis, an intriguing task in image generation that seeks to maintain a subject's identity while adding a personalized, stylistic touch. Traditional methods, such as Textual Inversion and DreamBooth, have made strides in custom image creation, but they come with significant drawbacks. These include the need for extensive resources and time for fine-tuning, as well as the requirement for multiple reference images. To overcome these challenges, our research introduces a novel approach to identity-preserving synthesis, with a particular focus on human images. Our model leverages a direct feed-forward mechanism, circumventing the need for intensive fine-tuning, thereby facilitating quick and efficient image generation. Central to our innovation is a hybrid guidance framework, which combines stylized images, facial images, and textual prompts to guide the image generation process. This unique combination enables our model to produce a variety of applications, such as artistic portraits and identity-blended images. Our experimental results, including both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing baseline models and previous works, particularly in its remarkable efficiency and ability to preserve the subject's identity with high fidelity.
Lights out: training RL agents robust to temporary blindness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Agents trained with DQN rely on an observation at each timestep to decide what action to take next. However, in real world applications observations can change or be missing entirely. Examples of this could be a light bulb breaking down, or the wallpaper in a certain room changing. While these situations change the actual observation, the underlying optimal policy does not change. Because of this we want our agent to continue taking actions until it receives a (recognized) observation again. To achieve this we introduce a combination of a neural network architecture that uses hidden representations of the observations and a novel n-step loss function. Our implementation is able to withstand location based blindness stretches longer than the ones it was trained on, and therefore shows robustness to temporary blindness. For access to our implementation, please email Nathan, Marije, or Pau.
MyPortrait: Morphable Prior-Guided Personalized Portrait Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generating realistic talking faces is an interesting and long-standing topic in the field of computer vision. Although significant progress has been made, it is still challenging to generate high-quality dynamic faces with personalized details. This is mainly due to the inability of the general model to represent personalized details and the generalization problem to unseen controllable parameters. In this work, we propose Myportrait, a simple, general, and flexible framework for neural portrait generation. We incorporate personalized prior in a monocular video and morphable prior in 3D face morphable space for generating personalized details under novel controllable parameters. Our proposed framework supports both video-driven and audio-driven face animation given a monocular video of a single person. Distinguished by whether the test data is sent to training or not, our method provides a real-time online version and a high-quality offline version. Comprehensive experiments in various metrics demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be publicly available.
RankZephyr: Effective and Robust Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking is a Breeze!
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In information retrieval, proprietary large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and open-source counterparts such as LLaMA and Vicuna have played a vital role in reranking. However, the gap between open-source and closed models persists, with reliance on proprietary, non-transparent models constraining reproducibility. Addressing this gap, we introduce RankZephyr, a state-of-the-art, open-source LLM for listwise zero-shot reranking. RankZephyr not only bridges the effectiveness gap with GPT-4 but in some cases surpasses the proprietary model. Our comprehensive evaluations across several datasets (TREC Deep Learning Tracks; NEWS and COVID from BEIR) showcase this ability. RankZephyr benefits from strategic training choices and is resilient against variations in initial document ordering and the number of documents reranked. Additionally, our model outperforms GPT-4 on the NovelEval test set, comprising queries and passages past its training period, which addresses concerns about data contamination. To foster further research in this rapidly evolving field, we provide all code necessary to reproduce our results at https://github.com/castorini/rank_llm.
Overview of RIS-Enabled Secure Transmission in 6G Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

As sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication networks evolve, privacy concerns are expected due to the transmission of vast amounts of security-sensitive private information. In this context, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) emerges as a promising technology capable of enhancing transmission efficiency and strengthening information security. This study demonstrates how RISs can play a crucial role in making 6G networks more secure against eavesdropping attacks. We discuss the fundamentals, and standardization aspects of RISs, along with an in-depth analysis of physical-layer security (PLS). Our discussion centers on PLS design using RIS, highlighting aspects like beamforming, resource allocation, artificial noise, and cooperative communications. We also identify the research issues, propose potential solutions, and explore future perspectives. Finally, numerical results are provided to support our discussions and demonstrate the enhanced security enabled by RIS.
Scaling-up Memristor Monte Carlo with magnetic domain-wall physics
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

By exploiting the intrinsic random nature of nanoscale devices, Memristor Monte Carlo (MMC) is a promising enabler of edge learning systems. However, due to multiple algorithmic and device-level limitations, existing demonstrations have been restricted to very small neural network models and datasets. We discuss these limitations, and describe how they can be overcome, by mapping the stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithm onto the physics of magnetic domain-wall Memristors to scale-up MMC models by five orders of magnitude. We propose the push-pull pulse programming method that realises SGLD in-physics, and use it to train a domain-wall based ResNet18 on the CIFAR-10 dataset. On this task, we observe no performance degradation relative to a floating point model down to an update precision of between 6 and 7-bits, indicating we have made a step towards a large-scale edge learning system leveraging noisy analogue devices.
Integrating Plug-and-Play Data Priors with Weighted Prediction Error for Speech Dereverberation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Speech dereverberation aims to alleviate the detrimental effects of late-reverberant components. While the weighted prediction error (WPE) method has shown superior performance in dereverberation, there is still room for further improvement in terms of performance and robustness in complex and noisy environments. Recent research has highlighted the effectiveness of integrating physics-based and data-driven methods, enhancing the performance of various signal processing tasks while maintaining interpretability. Motivated by these advancements, this paper presents a novel dereverberation frame-work, which incorporates data-driven methods for capturing speech priors within the WPE framework. The plug-and-play strategy (PnP), specifically the regularization by denoising (RED) strategy, is utilized to incorporate speech prior information learnt from data during the optimization problem solving iterations. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
On Age of Information and Energy-Transfer in a STAR-RIS-assisted System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Battery-limited devices and time-sensitive applications are considered as key players in the forthcoming wireless sensor network. Therefore, the main goal of the network is two-fold; Charge battery-limited devices, and provide status updates to users where information-freshness matters. In this paper, a multi-antenna base station (BS) in assistance of simultaneously-transmitting-and-reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) transmits power to energy-harvesting devices while controlling status update performance at information-users by analyzing age of information (AoI) metric. Therefore, we derive a scheduling policy at BS, and analyze joint transmit beamforming and amplitude-phase optimization at BS and STAR-RIS, respectively, to reduce average sum-AoI for the time-sensitive information-users while satisfying minimum required energy at energy-harvesting users. Moreover, two different energy-splitting and mode switching policies at STAR-RIS are studied. Then, by use of an alternating optimization algorithm, the optimization problem is studied and non-convexity of the problem is tackled by using the successive convex approximation technique. Through numerical results, AoI-metric and energy harvesting requirements of the network are analyzed versus different parameters such as number of antennas at BS, size of STAR-RIS, and transmitted power to highlight how we can improve two fold performance of the system by utilizing STAR-RIS compared to the conventional RIS structure.
Leveraging Domain Adaptation and Data Augmentation to Improve Qur'anic IR in English and Arabic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we approach the problem of Qur'anic information retrieval (IR) in Arabic and English. Using the latest state-of-the-art methods in neural IR, we research what helps to tackle this task more efficiently. Training retrieval models requires a lot of data, which is difficult to obtain for training in-domain. Therefore, we commence with training on a large amount of general domain data and then continue training on in-domain data. To handle the lack of in-domain data, we employed a data augmentation technique, which considerably improved results in MRR@10 and NDCG@5 metrics, setting the state-of-the-art in Qur'anic IR for both English and Arabic. The absence of an Islamic corpus and domain-specific model for IR task in English motivated us to address this lack of resources and take preliminary steps of the Islamic corpus compilation and domain-specific language model (LM) pre-training, which helped to improve the performance of the retrieval models that use the domain-specific LM as the shared backbone. We examined several language models (LMs) in Arabic to select one that efficiently deals with the Qur'anic IR task. Besides transferring successful experiments from English to Arabic, we conducted additional experiments with retrieval task in Arabic to amortize the scarcity of general domain datasets used to train the retrieval models. Handling Qur'anic IR task combining English and Arabic allowed us to enhance the comparison and share valuable insights across models and languages.
Deterministic Guidance Diffusion Model for Probabilistic Weather Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Weather forecasting requires not only accuracy but also the ability to perform probabilistic prediction. However, deterministic weather forecasting methods do not support probabilistic predictions, and conversely, probabilistic models tend to be less accurate. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce the \textbf{\textit{D}}eterministic \textbf{\textit{G}}uidance \textbf{\textit{D}}iffusion \textbf{\textit{M}}odel (DGDM) for probabilistic weather forecasting, integrating benefits of both deterministic and probabilistic approaches. During the forward process, both the deterministic and probabilistic models are trained end-to-end. In the reverse process, weather forecasting leverages the predicted result from the deterministic model, using as an intermediate starting point for the probabilistic model. By fusing deterministic models with probabilistic models in this manner, DGDM is capable of providing accurate forecasts while also offering probabilistic predictions. To evaluate DGDM, we assess it on the global weather forecasting dataset (WeatherBench) and the common video frame prediction benchmark (Moving MNIST). We also introduce and evaluate the Pacific Northwest Windstorm (PNW)-Typhoon weather satellite dataset to verify the effectiveness of DGDM in high-resolution regional forecasting. As a result of our experiments, DGDM achieves state-of-the-art results not only in global forecasting but also in regional forecasting. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/DongGeun-Yoon/DGDM}.
Low-complexity Linear Multicast Beamforming for Cache-aided MIMO Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

A practical and scalable multicast beamformer design in multi-input multi-output~(MIMO) coded caching~(CC) systems is introduced in this paper. The proposed approach allows multicast transmission to multiple groups with partially overlapping user sets using receiver dimensions to distinguish between different group-specific streams. Additionally, it provides flexibility in accommodating various parameter configurations of the MIMO-CC setup and overcomes practical limitations, such as the requirement to use successive interference cancellation~(SIC) at the receiver, while achieving the same degrees-of-freedom~(DoF). To evaluate the proposed scheme, we define the symmetric rate as the sum rate of the partially overlapping streams received per user, comprising a linear multistream multicast transmission vector and the linear minimum mean square error~(LMMSE) receiver. The resulting non-convex symmetric rate maximization problem is solved using alternative optimization and successive convex approximation~(SCA). Moreover, a fast iterative Lagrangian-based algorithm is developed, significantly reducing the computational overhead compared to previous designs. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated by extensive simulations.
A Review of Password-less User Authentication Schemes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Since the demise of the password was predicted in 2004, different attempts in industry and academia have been made to create an alternative for the use of passwords in authentication, without compromising on security and user experience. This review examines password-less authentication schemes that have been proposed since after the death knell was placed on passwords in 2004. We start with a brief discussion of the requirements of authentication systems and then identify various password-less authentication proposals to date. We then evaluate the truly password-less and practical schemes using a framework that examines authentication credentials based on their impact on user experience, overall security, and ease of deployment. The findings of this review observe a difficulty in balancing security with a user experience compared to that of passwords in new password-less schemes, providing the opportunity for new applied research to leverage existing knowledge and combine technologies and techniques in innovative ways that can address this imbalance.
Towards Causal Representations of Climate Model Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Climate models, such as Earth system models (ESMs), are crucial for simulating future climate change based on projected Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. While ESMs are sophisticated and invaluable, machine learning-based emulators trained on existing simulation data can project additional climate scenarios much faster and are computationally efficient. However, they often lack generalizability and interpretability. This work delves into the potential of causal representation learning, specifically the \emph{Causal Discovery with Single-parent Decoding} (CDSD) method, which could render climate model emulation efficient \textit{and} interpretable. We evaluate CDSD on multiple climate datasets, focusing on emissions, temperature, and precipitation. Our findings shed light on the challenges, limitations, and promise of using CDSD as a stepping stone towards more interpretable and robust climate model emulation.
BenchLMM: Benchmarking Cross-style Visual Capability of Large Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) such as GPT-4V and LLaVA have shown remarkable capabilities in visual reasoning with common image styles. However, their robustness against diverse style shifts, crucial for practical applications, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark, BenchLMM, to assess the robustness of LMMs against three different styles: artistic image style, imaging sensor style, and application style, where each style has five sub-styles. Utilizing BenchLMM, we comprehensively evaluate state-of-the-art LMMs and reveal: 1) LMMs generally suffer performance degradation when working with other styles; 2) An LMM performs better than another model in common style does not guarantee its superior performance in other styles; 3) LMMs' reasoning capability can be enhanced by prompting LMMs to predict the style first, based on which we propose a versatile and training-free method for improving LMMs; 4) An intelligent LMM is expected to interpret the causes of its errors when facing stylistic variations. We hope that our benchmark and analysis can shed new light on developing more intelligent and versatile LMMs.